X referenced Scene

[Adam H. Stewart]

I always seem to be posting these very general questions lately - I am delving deeper into 3ds then I have before and am lacking the experience to troubleshoot myself.

My problem is I am working with an Xreferenced scene from a local drive. It renders perfectly from the local drive on my machine - but when I try to net render everything goes to Sh****t. I have map everything to a mapped network drive - all the slaves can see this drive but it refuses to Net render. I get all sorts of crazy errors and sometimes when I save the scene to the network with a an Xreference the project becomes corrupt and 3ds crashes.

Does anybody out there use Xreference and if so what are your networking experiences ?

P.S.
Sorry I can't give more details of the problem - but I have been up to my eyes all day doing every kind of test I can think of and getting knowhere.

Thanks as always.

[instinct]

usually i´d say using mapped drives is always a bad idea in max + netrender. i usually just create a link to the actual network location. you might want to try that.

Greetings,
Thorsten

[Da_elf]

funny. but ive used mapped network drives for ages here and ive never had a single problem

[instinct]

mapped drives have the tendency to cause "human problems" not computer problems....ppl tend to do stupid things...like having different drive letters for the same network share :P Been there, seen it and stopped it :P

Thorsten

[Da_elf]

oh. right. yeah. the human element known as moron-itus is always a problem. my physical work drive is drive F so on all my render slaves i use the drive letter F to create a mapped network drive to the shared physical F drive

[Dynedain]

Also, WinXP has a habit of breaking network drive connections, and not restoring them without a restart or 3rd party utility. Using UNC paths makes this not an issue. And network drives can be problems if you forget to setup the network drive on a particular machine.

[Da_elf]

what do you mean by breaking them? ive done some network renders that have taken as long as 2 weeks to render and not once was a drive broken, disconnected, cut, removed. etc

[Adam H. Stewart]

7.5 issues

I have just read in the general area for Vray that there are Xref problems with 7.5. I really hope this isn't what I am experiencing as I just went through the install on the render servers.
I have all the drives mapped using the same letter and havn't had these sort of problems before so I am thinking it is something that has recently changed.
I'll keep you posted for the good of humanity and not going insane for anybody who might be having similar issues.

Thanks for the help.

[Adam H. Stewart]

Reaction Manager

So my problem seems to have been caused by the reaction Manager. I can't be 100 % but for the moment that seems to have been the cause.
I had to go in and delete all the nmaiton I had set up - and extra pity as that is the reason I was using the Xref scene in the first place
Maybe or maybe not this would have been cured with 3ds 7 ?
Haven't had the chance to do that test yet.

[Dynedain]

what do you mean by breaking them? ive done some network renders that have taken as long as 2 weeks to render and not once was a drive broken, disconnected, cut, removed. etc

See here:
http://www.chaosgroup.com/forum/phpB...ic.php?t=10589

This is not the first time I've seen it happen either. If a server goes down, or the network gets briefly disconnected, this can happen as well.

And when you add new machines/workstations to your setup, its one less configuration step to worry about.

[Da_elf]

well. thats not to say it happens for eveyone though. because its never happened to me

[Dynedain]

well. thats not to say it happens for eveyone though. because its never happened to me

Never said it did...just that IMHO its better to use UNC than mapped drives.

(BTW, mapped drives to shares on Mac servers is a friggin pain in the ass)

[Da_elf]

ah ok. its strange though. why would some people have zero problems with windows networking or ever vray DR and other have problems up the wazoo. lots of people complain about DR but ive never had any problems. my windows was a simple install and the only thing ive done for it is to have altered it according to greg hess. http://www.3dluvr.com/content/article/123
im not using any networking software. i dont have any special log on or user accounts and i dont use virus protection or firewalls.

[percydaman]

and i dont use virus protection or firewalls.

what did you say your IP was again?

[Da_elf]

my work computers are not on the internet. that would be just plain stupid